Like so many PhD students these days, I did many other projects while I was "writing my thesis". A mixture of trying to avoid the isolation that plagues doctoral study, insatiable curiosity and an inability to focus on a sole project for too long lead me to take any collaborative opportunity which came my way. The longest running of these was the "How to Get an Academic Job" project, which I joined as a bright-eyed, naive first year PhD. As our article based on the project has recently been published, now seems like a good time to reflect on the whole process.
Back in late 2012, Dr Anna Mountford-Zimdars - Senior Lecturer at King's Learning Institute, specialising in access to Higher Education and employment - put out a call through the Graduate School for PhD students to participate in a project on academic hiring, which would involve interviewing academics from our discipline. She ended up with 12 researchers from different arts, humanities and social science disciplines, as well as two international students (from Italy and Korea) who provided an insight into academic life and hiring in their home countries. Over the course of the academic year, we worked collaboratively to develop research questions, carry out the study and analyse the results. The first stage was a meeting with Anna and Charles, our learning technologist, which began with a discussion about what we, the student-researchers, wanted to get out of the project. This was a decisive moment: while Anna had planned a project on academic hiring - what do junior academics think helped them to get their jobs, what do senior academics look for when they are on hiring panels - it soon became clear that as student-researchers we were concerned about whether we should be trying for an academic job in the first place. Is it worth it? The interview plan thus developed to include questions about what academic life is like day-to-day, what academics value about it and what they dislike, alongside the questions about career histories. When the time came to analyse the results, the most interesting findings in my mind came from the interplay between these two areas. Of particular note was the fact that many academics gave human interaction - above all nurturing students - as what they valued most about the job, and yet it was one of the least recognised factors in academic hiring.
The research itself involved each of us interviewing two academics in our field - a new hire and a professor or head of department. In the article we eventually published, we recommended more dialogue between graduate students and staff about career trajectories, as the real life stories are often quite different to the image created by just looking as person specs or job adverts. Some participants also noted that it made high-up academics seem much more human to them, perhaps opening a path for more collaboration across career stages. To carry out the interviews, we were all given training on qualitative research methods and ethics, entirely new to some of us.
After our first interviews, we posted recordings and our preliminary thoughts on a private online discussion forum. We were paired up so that researchers from different disciplines listened to each other's interviews (I learnt about Management) and also wrote down our thoughts on them. This both allowed reflection on similarities and differences between subjects, and established closer relationships between members of the team. When we met up to discuss findings and next steps, all of this was celebrated with cake, a much needed part of any project.
After this meeting, we set up a working group to process the data. Between five of us, we produced materials including top tips, case studies and visualisations, used in a leaflet for students, a website and on a poster presented at a teaching and learning conference at King's.
The final stage was just Anna and me. This is where the real collaborative work began. Rather than each working on separate sections, we worked together to write first a presentation for a Higher Education Academy conference on student transitions, and then the aforementioned article. Over tea, pizza, and more cake, we discussed the shape of the paper, what was important to include, and how to respond to the reviewers' suggestions. Anna brought expert knowledge of the discipline, I brought my linguist's eye for the nuances in words used in interviews, and for crafting a story out of data. Such collaborative writing seems to be the done thing in Education, it is much less common in languages (although notable recent examples include this paper on Modern Languages and Digital Humanities by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman. I'm hoping to continue writing collaboratively if any volunteers are reading!
Ironically, I'm pretty certain the article did not help me to get an academic job. The academics we interviewed offered a wide range of factors they look for when hiring - including enthusiasm for the discipline and collegiality - but, as to be expected, publications came out on top. And publications means publications in your discipline which can be submitted to the REF- as recent job interviews have confirmed - not an education article. But the skills I learned from it, the intellectually challenging experience, and the social aspects have strengthened me as a researcher and will no doubt influence my future work.
